How to find end buyers in market crawling with wholesalers?

[Frank Bartlo]

I currently have a property I got for almost nothing in a tax sale that I intend to wholesale, but in my market (Detroit) properties such as this have very low value, so I need to find an "end buyer"/rehabber. At a 70K ARV and about 30K of work needed, there's plenty of "room" in the deal for a rehabber, so one would think I'd have no problem, but supply and demand has changed the equation on account of the oversupply of fixer properties and the undersupply of rehabbers.

The other alternative would be to find the financing to fix it. But that seems unlikely, as I don't have verifiable income, few hard money people lend in the city proper, let alone in the worst areas, and I've no cash reserves of my own at this time.

Lately I've found when advertising any "fixer-upper" just about everyone that calls is another wholesaler trying to tie up and broker the deal. The market is just crawling with wholesalers. I've often seen the same property advertised by several people. Not that mind people brokering a deal, it's just that I don't want my property to be tied up and not close.

It used to be that one could just run an ad in the Sunday paper and be blitzed with calls from good buyers with cash in hand, but now the real estate classifieds section has shrunk to almost nothing as the readership has dwindled and ad rates have been jacked up. I just ran an ad in which I stated a $500 earnest money requirement to ward off the non-serious buyers, but only got a couple calls. I wonder if many people looking for properties to rehab even look in the paper any more.

So, successful wholesalers, how do you find your end buyers, aside from newspaper ads?

Or should I just get a bit more creative with my selling terms and ways of dealing with the horde of wholesalers to harness any connections they might have (advertising agreements or some such)?